Housing tenant lives in fear

A New Plymouth woman living in fear of her neighbours says she is running out of people to turn to for help.

Joanna Tarr contacted the Taranaki Daily News after seeing Saturday's story about a tenant who said Housing New Zealand had failed to address her requests for maintenance on her state house.

"I feel for her and can understand where she is coming from," Ms Tarr said.

In the past two years, Ms Tarr has asked Housing NZ to put in a fence around her Spotswood property and later asked to be moved into a vacant state house down the street after constantly feeling threatened by her neighbours, but has seen no action.

"You ring up and you're put through to a call system. They record the complaint, say someone will get back to you and no-one does."

Housing NZ's general manager of tenancy services, Kay Read, said the organisation was unable to talk specifically about the situation for privacy reasons, but said safety concerns were taken seriously. "We have been in contact with the tenant in recent months to discuss options. We are continuing to work with her."

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Ms Tarr wondered why Housing NZ did not simply move her and her family to one of the state houses down the street that had been empty for six months.

Some of the attacks against Ms Tarr and her family include their swimming pool being slashed, the house being egged, someone knocking on her daughters' windows at night, and her car was broken into on Sunday.

Ms Tarr said she had been trying to resolve the problem for two years. "It's got to the point where I can't let my kids play outside. It makes me feel isolated in my own house."

One of her daughters is intellectually disabled and suffers from severe eczema that is helped by sunlight, but if she goes outside to play, abuse is yelled at her, Ms Tarr said.

"The girls go outside and I can hear the kids mouthing off at them, saying ‘I'm going to get you; I'm going to kill you'."

Ms Tarr's mother, Audrey Weir, was sickened by the lack of action taken to ensure her daughter's family's safety.